Life

For the longest time in my life, I have wanted to learn meditation. People always made it sound so mystical and so powerful, that I wanted to have my share of it too. At least, that’s how the fad for meditation started. I remember trying to meditate as early as my mid-twenties in 2006-2007. My mom could meditate but she never made it sound like anything special. My maternal grandfather was so good at it that we always thought he was asleep sitting. Nope, he wasn’t. Let me share an anecdote to that effect. ...

I’ll be 40 in a year or two. I distinctly remember feeling a stomach churn and completely unprepared when I turned 30. I had just finished my MS thesis and joined Atheros. I had a long way to go to have something I could call a career. It was very unsettling at that time. But then things happened and here I am, almost ten years later, still embarked on a journey to identify the problems I really want to solve. ...

Even at the cost of annoying folks around me, I’d dare say that 2020 has actually been a fabulous year for me, personally. I learnt quite a bit about myself, learnt a couple of new skills, learnt what I don’t like, what I don’t want to do, fixed a couple of things about my health and more. I’ll try to chronicle these for the rest of the post. I typically consider my date of birth as the beginning of another year. And for a long time, I wrote up my aspirations for the year ahead. But a couple of years back, I found that I couldn’t keep pace with my aspirations and looking back was a tragic opportunity cost all around me. So I stopped doing this. This year, though, I’ll try and redo the aspirations for the year ahead. But I’ll also try to stay realistic. ...

I recently finished a course on Coursera. Machine Learning from Andrew Ng. Its been on my radar for the longest time and after several false starts, I finally completed mid last month. But along the way I learnt two things: I still relish math like I always did. I understood the concepts pretty well and am able to come up with correct solutions. I am somewhat terrible at coding them up. Now that’s a big surprise to me. I’ve been writing code for quite a long time now. After learning half a dozen programming languages and spending almost a decade writing code, it is a bit of a shock that I find it somewhat difficult to code up the algorithms. And especially in Octave/Matlab. I got thinking. I have built an entire application with all its shenanigans using python. I have been running it on AWS for at least 2 years now and I haven’t so much as contacted their support for anything other than increasing limits. And yet, here I am unable to code up a simple nested for loop to implement a linear regression model. I realised the problem to be, again, two-fold. ...

I am terrible at taking notes. I guess I never learnt the skill properly. Until two days back, I had 6 note taking apps on my device, each having a copy of all the projects I am working on, status, todo list (unchecked), and thoughts and action items for each. Each of these has some overlap, so they aren’t imported around. I spent last morning cleaning up every one of them, copying them to two main tools and deleting every thing else. The two tools are – org-mode on my emacs and another app called Agenda. ...

My son’s school is running an eco-diversity project. Yes, he is in kindergarten, and he probably doesn’t understand the term yet. But that’s ok. It is more to teach the kids to treat all lives equally. But the thing is this – as with all school projects, there is an implicit acceptance from the parent’s side. As a parent, I am thrilled to see my son participate and learn this stuff. This was stuff I figured for myself when I was 30 and reflecting on life (why at 30 is more or less the theme of this blog!). ...

I briefly lost the site to a sysadmin disaster. Although I didn’t quite create the disaster on my own, I had to clean up after a failed upgrade script. Anyway, the site is back up and even if I don’t have much to say in it. It took me about 15 minutes to fix it. The exact 15 minutes I didn’t feel like spending for over two weeks when the disaster first occurred. ...

School killed poetry for me. The only poem I grew to appreciate was – “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost – much later in my life than I was originally introduced to the poem. That said, I never appreciated other poetry for a very long time. I blame schooling for this debacle because I have come to realize that poetry is the most beautiful expression there is. For what its worth, words are always lacking when it comes to expression and poetry is, perhaps, an earnest attempt to fill that gap. ...

I had never been one to appreciate music. I had a few tracks that I listened to all through college. I still remember the CD that Satya gave me – sort of an initiation to rock and metal, so to say. I wasn’t quite a fan of classical music at the time. Neither Indian classical nor western classical. I did like a selected 2-3 songs from each of the prominent boy-bands of the time – Backstreet Boys, Boyzone and the like. A fad that I grew out of in a couple of months time. The only bands that stuck to my playlists are Nickelback and Iron maiden. Most of the rest are singles and a good mix of pop, rock and melodies. ...

I stumbled upon this pure genius on Netflix by serendipity. And I don’t think I have laughed as much on anything else. This is the kind of absurd humour that I enjoy the most – I wonder what that says about me, sometimes. This genre is somewhat hard to find, though. For a long time, it was only the Monty Pythons that worked on this genre. Then I stumbled upon Douglas Adams and haven’t looked back since. I think Douglas Adams is the absolute epitome of this genre. There are so many instances in the hitch hiker’s book that I still reminisce and laugh over. Dirk Gently, incidentally, is from Douglas Adams too. ...